Since most Saudi graduate students are not proficient in English, they are required to take an ESP course to enable them to read and comprehend reference material in English and translate the required information for their assignments and theses. Based on a needs assessment questionnaire and an English Proficiency Test results, an ESP course was especially designed to meet art education students’ academic and professional needs. At the end of the semester, the students were post-tested. The posttest required the students to locate main ideas and supporting details and to figure out meanings of key art terms from context. It also required them to identify the part of speech and break art terms into prefixes, suffixes and roots. They also gave the overall meaning of a paragraph in Arabic. A detailed description of the content sampled, skills tested, sample items, and statistical analyses of the ESP reading tests are reported. 

Prof. Reima Al-jarf
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/aljarf